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    Unless the word were not misspelled, but incomplete? The message had been interrupted? Suggesting duress?
    I felt in my bones that I had hit upon the truth; Lady Cecily had been unable to finish her message. Evidently she was closely watched. I wished she had simply written in plain English, for she could have managed that more quickly.
    But then I realised why she had not done so. “Invisible” ink, although it dries clear, is not actually impossible to see; it leaves a sheen noticeable in certain lights. Handwriting might have been detected. But the straight-lined cipher had concealed itself nicely along the folds of the fan, looking like a sort of decoration, while being simple for a recipient to solve.
    Clever.
    And desperate. A cipher secretly written in invisible ink on a paper fan of all things, then slipped to someone she met by accident, someone she barely knew—certainly such a cipher ought to be a plea for assistance, for rescue, for help—
    Of course.
    The first four letters were not HELC ; they were HELP . The cipher for P looked just like the cipher for C except that it included a dot, which evidently I had not perceived.
    What of clock , then?
    Eureka! The next word had to be locked !
    Feverishly addressing my pencil to the cipher again, mindful of missing dots, I eventually arrived at the following:
    Deciphered:

     
    HELPLOCKEDIN
    ROOMSTARVED
    UNLES
     
     
    Or, in plainer English, “Help! I am being locked in my room and starved—unless…”
     
     
    I must admit that my first reaction upon reading this was one of immense gratification; I felt all of the thrill of the chase. And of elucidation: Eureka! I understood why Lady Cecily had worn such a silly thing as a bell skirt. She had been forced to do so, in order to hobble her so that she could not possibly run away from her dragonish chaperones. Now, with her errands completed, she was, presumably, locked away again. But where? Here was a case of a missing person indeed! I anticipated search, adventure, perhaps even a rescue—
    But immediately my fervour turned to horror for Cecily’s sake. Could I find her in time? Could I find her before—
    What? She was being locked up and starved unless what?
    Unless she yielded to some demand, obviously. Unless she obeyed some command she had so far defied. Unless she agreed to—
    “Oh, no,” I whispered as I remembered. “Oh, how awful! Could it be?”
    A trousseau you will need, and a trousseau you shall have , one of the guardian dowagers had said.
    I had no very clear idea what a trousseau looked like or what might be included in one; to the best of my knowledge it consisted of expensive, lacy unmentionables. But I knew what a trousseau was for .
    They had brought her to London to shop for a trousseau.
    This meant that there was none prepared already—there had been no period of engagement during which ribbons and ruffles might lovingly be stitched—and there was no time to order a supremely fashionable one from abroad.
    In my horror I leapt to my feet, spilling paper, pencil, and writing desk to the floor.
    Lady Cecily was going to be married.
    Soon.
    And against her will.

C HAPTER THE S IXTH
     
    I HAD TO FIND HER. H AD TO FIND L ADY C ECILY AND rescue her from such a dreadful and unjust fate.
    But how?
    Enola, calm yourself. Think. That voice from within—it was as if my mother spoke to me, and for a moment Mum’s face filled my mind.
    A comforting memory, but with it came a discomfiting thought: I had been putting off the task of finding Mum. Why?
    Did I really not wish to see her?
    What sort of daughter was I?
    But then again, it was Mum who had first run away, not I.
    Yet hadn’t I forgiven her?
    Blast everything! Confound questions I could not answer—no, did not wish to answer.
    Mentally thrusting them to the side, I sat down, picked up pencil and paper again, and told myself that, being in such dire straits, Lady Cecily came foremost. Then Mum. Then, a distant third, the Army